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Friday, April 25, 2014

This has been a busy month and my own writing has suffered, but I have managed to complete all my assignments for my Fiction Techniques course and will turn in my final draft of the new story I wrote for this course next week. So, I count that as a big win for the month of April.

In a couple of weeks I plan to launch my second annual "Story A Week Summer" personal challenge. I did this last summer and was thrilled at the number of story drafts I pulled out and finished, as well as the new stories that got started as a result of this challenge....so I decided to do it again!

Here is a copy of the chart I'm going to use. I have a few ideas for those early weeks, but I honestly don't quite know where this is going to lead me. I'm eager to see what this chart looks like as I begin to fill it in.

Just like last year, my summer has seventeen weeks, since I'm counting from the beginning of May to just before Labor Day. That seems a long way away right now, but I suspect the coming months will go fast. I'll be filing periodic progress reports as the summer gets underway, so stay tuned!

Sunday, April 13, 2014

A few weeks ago, a friend forwarded a link to a very interesting video showing a new way to visualize the flight of starlings as they flock around power lines. Later, I located a link to an article in Wired about it, explaining this new way of manipulating video footage.
The resulting movie makes the trajectory of each bird's flight path visible. Take a look! This is totally mesmerizing....

Monday, April 7, 2014

As a yoga teacher, I often tell my students that they really won't begin to experience the full value of yoga until they develop a daily practice. It doesn't have to take a lot of time, I tell them. Even fifteen minutes a day of consistent practice will make a world of difference in the benefits that yoga can produce in one's life.

I say this a lot, so it was with a pang of guilt and humility that I came to realize a few months ago that my own daily practice had taken a nose dive. For years before I became a teacher I practiced every day. I continued that daily practice during my teacher training. As I began teaching, though, my own practice began to change and, before I realized what was happening, had nearly disappeared from my routine.

It was the need to prepare lesson plans that started this change. My own practice began to be geared toward working out sequences through which I could teach certain concepts and ideas in my class. My students certainly benefited from a well-thought-out class plan, but I noticed that my own practice began to become more sporadic and unbalanced.

Apparently, this is a well-known problem that yoga teachers often face, as I found out after talking with several colleagues. We know the importance of a daily practice, we believe in it--but the message quickly becomes, "Do as I say, not as I do."

A few months ago, in December, I had a couple of weeks off from teaching at the same time I also had a few quiet weeks at home, so I took the opportunity to tackle this problem of a terribly inconsistent personal practice. I set an intention to practice asana and meditation every day for those two weeks.

Instead of directing my own practice, I pulled out Judith Lasater's book, "Thirty Essential Yoga Poses for Beginning Students and their Teachers," and followed her Day of the Week sequences. These seven pose collections cycle through all the essential basic poses. Within a week, I had rediscovered the joy of a well-rounded and consistent yoga practice. After two weeks, I was feeling more centered and calm than I had in a very long time.

The new year began and I started to teach again, but by then I was stuck on my daily practice, unwilling to give up this special time for myself each morning. I continued with a daily asana and meditation routine, sometimes using Lasater's book, sometimes dipping into the essential sequences in Patricia Walden's book, "The Woman's Book of Yoga and Health." Occasionally, I went back to my own self-guided practice, but I enjoyed having these two wise and experienced teachers to guide my practice through their writing.

I've been keeping a journal about this, each day writing a short entry, just a sentence or two, about what I did in my practice that day. Recently, I passed the 100-day mark in my journal, and while it felt like a great accomplishment to have reached this number, I knew I was not a bit interested in stopping.

I will keep doing this practice every day, even if I have only ten minutes to do it. No amount of yoga is too small. What is important is the consistency and commitment. This is a truth I have known for a long time and I'm very happy to admit that I am now, finally, practicing what I teach.

Welcome!

I am a writer. I use writing to simplify my life. I spend my days writing, but somehow I still need to write about it, so you'll see a lot here about my writing projects and publishing efforts.

I have a lot of interests beyond writing...photography, yoga, gardening, books I've read, travel. Oh, and did I mention science? You'll still see a lot of that, too. I love complex systems...fractals, emergence, chaos...but I also love space, astronomy, cosmology...in other words, all things awesome.

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